Multiple Modernities: Carmen de Burgos, Author and Activist ed. by Anja Louis and Michelle M. Sharp (review)

One of Spain’s most important modernist writers and political activists for women’s equality and children’s rights, Carmen de Burgos, was a leading intellectual figure at the turn of the twentieth century. She has been often forgotten, devalued, or overshadowed by her male contemporary writers. Burgos, an enthusiastic supporter of the Second Republic, died soon after its proclamation and her work was banned from public education during Francoism. In the last forty years, the eager work of dedicated scholars on both sides of the Atlantic has contributed to recuperate her figure, her publications, and has drawn attention to her contributions to the general public but especially to researchers, students, and professors in the field of twentieth-century Spanish literature.

This remarkable collection of essays, Multiple Modernities: Carmen de Burgos, Author and Activist, is part of this effort to reclaim her relevance in Spanish history and feminism. As the editors state in the introduction, these new readings on Burgos’s works confirm her pivotal place in Spanish feminist history as a precursor of the Spanish first-wave feminism. Anja Louis and Michelle M. Sharp also assert:

Burgos was a mirror of her era, and her personal history mirrors Spain’s modernization and democratization, which led to unprecedented social and political reforms. She bridged the generational shift from nineteenth-century feminists, such as Concepción Arenal, Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer and Emilia Pardo Bazán to her contemporaries and fellow activists Clara Campoamor, and Margarita Nielsen.

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In this opening edition, the first two articles focus on Burgos’s life starting with Elisabeth Starčević, the first researcher who published a doctoral thesis completely devoted to Burgos in the United States in 1976. The critic draws direct references to her struggle to bring back to life the work of Burgos and the battles she faced in Spain. To remind the reader, as Louis and Sharp also point out, that, in 1970, the personal was political (8). Along these lines, Maryellen Bieder, in the second chapter, also draws attention to the need to unearth the multiple lacunae of Burgos’s life to understand all nuance of her work and biography. She focuses on unresolved enigmas such as the influence of Krausism and Masonry in her life, her personal fight for human rights, and her contributions as a feminist and as key intellectual of her time.

The next three chapters, led by Roberta Johnson, explore Burgos’s literary and political contributions in detail. Johnson frames the work of Burgos as central as that of Feminist figures such as Benito Feijoo, Concepción Arenal, Celia Amorós, and Lidia Falcón. The following two articles by Ana Simón Alegre and Thomas R. Franz point out the relevance of intertextuality and intellectual mediation in Burgos’s work, establishing the importance of the literary influence and the open dialogue the author had with Emilia Pardo Bazán, Concepción Gimeno, Miguel de Unamuno, and Pío Baroja.

The second section of this collection is built around six articles that exhibit, from different perspectives, a close reading analysis of some of the most relevant works by Burgos. Kathleen Doyle first published her study on La melena de la discordia, a thought-provoking essay where she establishes a correlation between fashion, models of femininity, and the embodiment of modernity within love relationships revealing the biblical implications of the novella’s main plot. In a similar way, Elena Lindholm’s analysis of El perseguidor, using her travelogue Peregrinaciones as a textual reference, argues that Burgos portrays a free and independent woman in this text while the protagonist of her fictional novella, El perseguidor, is constantly haunted by a Freudian patriarchal ghost. Lindholm explores how the modern female traveler struggles with the social haunting of marriage, revealing the ways in which the protagonist is trapped between tradition and modernity. Anja Louis in her study of La entrometida explores...